White House aides reportedly have a nickname for Ivanka Trump: 'Princess royal'

Ivanka Trump at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in July. REUTERS/Michael Kappeler, Pool Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump's eldest daughter who's a top adviser, is referred to as "princess royal" by some White House aides — at least behind her back — according to a new Vanity Fair report.

The first daughter's lofty — and, critics say, unearned — position in her father's administration has sparked frustration among some aides, who say that she and her husband, Jared Kushner, also a senior adviser, are ineffectual additions to the president's team.

Some are put off by the Trump family's nepotism. Critics were incensed when Ivanka temporarily took her father's seat at a meeting of the G-20 in Germany earlier this summer.

"Excuse me," one former Trump adviser told Vanity Fair. "This is not a royal family, and she's not the princess royal."

White House advisers have reportedly started calling Ivanka by this nickname behind her back.

Donald Trump has uncharacteristically taken some of the blame for the undoubtedly stressful position his daughter finds herself in, according to the report.

"If she weren't my daughter it would be so much easier for her," the president reportedly said at the G-20 gathering. "It might be the only bad thing she has going, if you want to know the truth."

While Ivanka is criticized by the left for her inability or unwillingness to rein in her father's most extreme policies and by the right for her attempts to do just that, Kushner, whose portfolio includes heading the Office of American Innovation and crafting Middle East policy, is ridiculed for his inexperience.

"What is off-putting about them is they do not grasp their essential irrelevance," a Washington insider told Vanity Fair. "They think they are special."

And the criticism appears to be getting to them. As one friend of the couple's put it, Washington "punctures their self-esteem on a daily basis."